Twitter and Comedy Central Team Up to Launch Comedy Festival

April 22, 2013 09:04:27 GMT

Judd Apatow, Rob Reiner and Mel Brooks will kick off the five-day event where comedians can tweet jokes and post videos using the hashtag #ComedyFest.

Comedy Central will host a comedy festival, not on a stage like other festivals commonly do, but on Twitter. During the five-day event which will start on Monday, April 29, comedians can tweet jokes and post videos with the recently launched video app Vine, which limits footage to 6 seconds, using the hashtag #ComedyFest.

Comedy legends such as Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner as well as young popular comics like Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer and Paul Feig are among those lined up to participate. The festival will be kicked off with an event at the Paley Center in Los Angeles in Monday. Reiner will be hosting, with Apatow trying to persuade technophobe Brooks to join Twitter.

On Tuesday, comedian Steve Agee will host a "Vine Dining" party, telling stories in six-second videos. The cast of HBO's "Veep" and the stars of ABC's drama series "Scandal" will also take part in the fest, sharing stories from the set.

"One of these days, we will be ambivalent about where people watch Comedy Central," Steve Grimes, the channel's senior vice president for programming and multiplatform strategy, told the Times. The partnership is aimed at promoting Comedy Central as an entertainment company that does not rely just on nightly television viewing.